It All Slips Away

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As our inevitable appointment with the final darkness grows closer, dissipation and despair await.

Can it make any difference that Matthew Arnold looked across a shingled beach toward Calais and saw “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery” and wrote that one poem that still moves men’s hearts? Would it make any difference if I could do the same, and “write me one, maybe as cold and passionate as the dawn?”

It all slips away. Animals I’ve loved are dead. Posts rot in the ground. My life’s work won’t survive by so many years. I can no longer count many posts and say, “my grandfather set those.” Is the touch of a woman from so long ago a consumed thing, offering only memory of warmth in the way of cold ashes from a long burned away fire?

I won’t forget her form, her hair, her scent, her laughter, the way she moved.

Or could the best moments remain forever like the day I arrived five minutes early and found her in rubber gloves cleaning her cat’s liter box?

I deadpanned, “You ruined it.”

“Ruined what?”

“One of the great romantic lines in all of literature when Romeo says to Juliet ‘Oh, to be a glove on that hand.’”

She understood better than I ever would. Once, she’d edited an edition of the play for an anthology.

I won’t forget her form, her hair, her scent, her laughter, the way she moved. Some few things are to keep. It’s as if the years don’t matter.

In a few minutes the rising sun will burn another early spring frost from the grass, and I will have survived another winter. And as they do every year as winter breaks in spring these lines from a 16th century fragment come to mind. “Oh, Western wind, when wilt thou blow/ That the small rain down can rain?/ Ah, Christ, that I were in my bed again/ And my love in my arms.”

On the best of these mornings, the strength rises in muscles restless to be tested once again, and I will laugh again a booming maniacal laugh as much for what is to come as for what I remember. And I remember another poet, it’s always another poet, this time Tennyson and his Ulysses, and those lines “Tho’ much is taken, much abides.”

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